Germans Wiped Kandanos Off the Map 85 Years Ago Today
Eighty-five years ago today, on June 3, 1941, German paratroopers entered the village of Kandanos in Crete's Chania region and systematically destroyed it. They executed approximately 180 civilians, burned every house to the ground, and then bulldozed the ruins entirely. A sign was posted in Greek and German where the village once stood.
The sign read: "Here stood Kandanos. Destroyed as atonement for the murder of 25 German soldiers." A second version went further, naming men, women, children, and priests as those who had dared resist, and ending with the declaration that Kandanos had been destroyed "never to be rebuilt again."
Here stood Kandanos. Destroyed as atonement for the murder of 25 German soldiers.
The massacre was ordered as reprisal for the fierce resistance Kandanos put up during the Battle of Crete from May 23 to 25, 1941. Armed with improvised weapons, local villagers had repelled a German motorized unit on May 23, killing 25 soldiers before being overrun two days later. On June 2, the same German paratroopers had already executed civilians in the nearby village of Kondomari, before moving on to Kandanos.
The unit responsible was the 3rd Parachute Battalion, led by Lieutenant Horst Trebes, acting under orders from General Kurt Student. Student was arrested by the British after Germany's surrender and tried by a military tribunal in May 1947 for war crimes committed in Crete. He was sentenced to five years in prison. Greece's request to have him extradited was rejected by the Allies.
Student was released in 1948 on health grounds and died in 1978 at the age of 88, never having faced justice in Greece. Kandanos was eventually rebuilt after the war, but the signs the Germans left behind remain one of the most chilling documented admissions of deliberate civilian destruction in occupied Greece.
